If Mayors Ruled the World

In our brand new series Me, Myself & We (performances and talks which in one way or another deal with the tension between the individual and the collective) the first talk will be given by the American political theorist Benjamin Barber, who was once an adviser to Bill Clinton.

On 1996 Barber became world famous for his book Jihad vs. McWorld. In it he wrote that organisations such as the UN, the IMF and the World Bank are paralysed by the sovereignty of their member states. Barber went in search of alternative building blocks for global governance. And it soon became clear that the city is the ideal candidate. ‘The city is the answer to the difficult question of whether a global form of democracy still exists.’

The latter is what Barber’s book If Mayors Ruled the World is all about. He will be presenting the book, which has only just been published, at the Kaaitheater.

Barber has already appeared at the Kaaitheater before. In 2008 he was the keynote speaker at the Global Interdependence Day Forum as part of Spoken Word 08.